Milky Way - on the right track?

Rob Thompson

Rob Thompson

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Robert
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I took the following photo the other night from Sark in the channel islands. As the world's only 'dark island' meaning no street lights I thought I would have no trouble capturing fantastic images of the night sky. Turns out it isn't as simple as I thought. For one I'm not sure I have a wide/fast enough lens. I ended up capturing this photo with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. Settings were f/1.8, ISO 400, 13s. I also tried higher ISOs but for whatever reason my best one was with those settings. Did a little tweaking in lightroom too...Any help welcome! Thank you.



View attachment 17101
 
I think 13 secs might be too long, I'm not astrophotographer but I have read a fair bit on it. Have you tried doing stacked images over 5 sec bursts, this minimises motion and use a stacking software (there is a great free one) and you take dark images and then the software does its magic and you get great sharp images. You might need a few hundred to get the effect you're after. Someone who does actually do this will hopefully be along. A wide lens would also be better as motion will occur and the stacking software will have plenty of maneuverability when it crops down to give you a super image.
Your shot is better than my attempt so i will say it's great but I think if you go search on free star stacking software and YouTube tutorial on it, you'll get some stunners. Good luck and well done!!
 
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Looks good to me and certainly better than anything I've produced. You might want to dial back the length of the exposure. With my 50mm prime I've noticed that to get pin sharp stars (rather than blobby stars) I need around a 3-5 second exposure length.

James
 
Thanks Carl! I'll look that up. Sadly I'm back from Sark now and doubt I'll see a sky like that again for a while (without trekking out into the middle of nowhere at 2am in the morning!) This was taken only at 11pm so if I wasn't so tired and stayed up longer it might have been even better...
Also I didn't realised I'd achieved this until I put it into the computer (couldn't tell from the camera display) so if I'd known I was on the right track I would have experimented much longer. Seeing this makes you realise how small we are though!
 
I have a D3200 and the highest (bearable) ISO I use is 800. I got a half decent shot of Orion using the same F stop as you but because my exposure length was quite long (8 seconds springs to mind) my stars were quite blobby.
 
Thanks. It seems that the stacking software is the only way for achieving sharper images. Without pushing the ISO really high to get a faster shutter speed I found that the images were too dark which is why I ended up with a longer exposure to avoid the higher ISO.
 
Rob Thompson said:
Thanks. It seems that the stacking software is the only way for achieving sharper images. Without pushing the ISO really high to get a faster shutter speed I found that the images were too dark which is why I ended up with a longer exposure to avoid the higher ISO.
Click to expand...

That's what I had done in the past but ended up with serious noise issues. The Stargazers Lounge is a very good forum for this sort of information.
 
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